Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Xtreme 1GB Review

It’s not that often that faithful PC gamers get a proper racing game for their platform of choice, but Dirt 2 is one of those. While it is a “console port”, there’s virtually nothing in the game that will make that point stand out. The game as a whole takes good advantage of our PC’s hardware, and it’s as challenging as it is good-looking.

Manual Run-through: The race we chose to use in Dirt 2 is the first one available in the game, as it’s easily accessible and features a lot of GPU-pounding effects that the game has become known for, such as realistic dust and water effects, a large on-looking crowd of people and fine details on and off the track. Each run-through lasts the entire two laps, which comes out to about 2.5 minutes.

Sapphire might have a possible winner here if these kinds of results keep up. With recent driver improvements, the HD 5850 is made quite a bit faster than the HD 6850, but remains a bit cheaper, and compared to the equally-priced HD 6790 and GeForce GTX 550 Ti, Sapphire’s card comes out well ahead.

Let’s see if this trend continues.